Exploring the Cinematic Brilliance of Christoph Hochhäuser: A Review of Till the End of the Night

A cop, Robert and a former convict, Leni reunite after having been apart for a long time. The atmosphere of joy at the party that celebrates Leni’s return is undercut by a palpable and yet clandestine tension that pervades the film from beginning to end. Robert and Leni pretend to be a couple so to catch a drug-dealing baron.

In Till the End of the Night everything and everybody are undercover: the fast-paced montage of a flat’s decoration with which the film opens retrospectively reveals the labyrinth of ‘mise-en-abyme’ of the characters’ essences and trajectories.

Amidst thriller-customary twists and turns, the film bares itself to be poignantly centred upon an existential question about love, identity and acceptance: what is of Robert’s love for the ‘former’ Leni, and what is of it for the ‘new’ Leni?

In his baroque envisioning, Christoph Hochhäuser develops this dilemma through an intense mix of melodrama and noir, creating a haunting atmosphere that burns unnervingly under the skin. Doorframes, window frames and mirror frames scaffold this narrative of loss - loss of one’s understanding of the self, of the other and of their mutual relation – just as the recurrent superimpositions and tracking shots echo its rhythm. Thea Ehre (Leni) and Tomocin Ziegler (Robert) provide a masterful show of the immensely complex sentiment of impossible love as encapsulated in the film’s yearning song Eine Liebe so wie du.